Our bodies are programmed to consume fat and sugars because they’re rare in nature.... In the same way, we’re biologically programmed to be attentive to things that stimulate: content that is gross, violent, or sexual and that gossip which is humiliating, embarrassing, or offensive. If we’re not careful, we’re going to develop the psychological equivalent of obesity. We’ll find ourselves consuming content that is least beneficial for ourselves or society as a whole.

Note:Who bookmarked this is ironically a filter

The word media, after all, comes from the Latin for “middle layer.” It sits between us and the world; the core bargain is that it will connect us to what’s happening but at the price of direct experience.

Note:A buffer, an interface

Among techies, these two paradigms came to be known as push technology and pull technology. A Web browser is an example of pull technology: You put in an address, and your computer pulls information from that server. Television and the mail, on the other hand, are push technologies: The information shows up on the tube or at your doorstop without any action on your end. Internet enthusiasts were excited about the shift from push to pull for reasons that are now pretty obvious: Rather than wash the masses in waves of watered-down, lowest-common-denominator content, pull media put users in control.

Note:Two key terms

In his seminal book The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler describes creativity as “bisociation”—the intersection of two “matrices” of thought: “Discovery is an analogy no one has ever seen before.” Friedrich Kekule’s epiphany about the structure of a benzene molecule after a daydream about a snake eating its tail is an example. So is Larry Page’s insight to apply the technique of academic citation to search. “Discovery often means simply the uncovering of something which has always been there but was hidden from the eye by the blinkers of habit,” Koestler wrote. Creativity...